A project management blog for manufacturing and engineering
Here’s an easy way to create new work orders in Standard Time®. The “Project Assistant” in this video steps through all the pages of a new project.
And did you know, once you have created a project, you can create a copy from it? Creating a duplicate of an existing project is even simpler. Just right-click on any project and choose Duplicate! Now you have a new work order that is ready to scan!
Watch this video for inspiration. 🙂
Follow these steps to prep a new job for the shop floor. Once prepped, employees can scan the job name and tasks. A timer will start. They can scan again to stop that timer. Now you’ve got timestamped records of all employee working on jobs.
You may have hundreds of project and thousands of tasks for engineering and production. This video shows how to manage those tasks in a calendar. Specifically, a graphical calendar that displays tasks on dates and hours of the day. Drag and drop tasks to various dates to manage start and finish dates. Then view a bar chart of future manpower efforts in what we call the “Resource Allocation” chart.
This video uses the Standard Time cloud test site.
Manufacturing reports include everything from employee activity to detailed KPI’s. How do you customize these reports in Standard Time® for your purposes? With custom fields. These fields may contain the results of barcode scans, automated input, or manual entry. However the data arrives, they are included on reports using this method.
Watch the video and try it yourself!
How do your manufacturing managers know which orders are running on which assembly lines? Got software for that? Yeah? Then you’re good to go!
Software to track orders in manufacturing is called an MRP. What’s an MRP?
An MRP is a manufacturing resource planner. It is used to plan and schedule resources like assembly lines, equipment, materials, and even human resources. I.e. employees.
Standard Time® is an MRP. It tracks projects and orders on assembly lines. Or, if you don’t have assembly lines it tracks orders through your manufacturing facility. Find out where each order is, what status it is in right now, and how much work is left to go.
Watch the video and then give it a try.
Question: How do you organize and report on manufacturing projects? That is to say, what criteria groups projects into working buckets? Do you put them into portfolios so you can see which portfolio performs best? Or set the status of projects to report on stages or phases? How about assign them to assembly lines to see slots where new projects can go? Those are all techniques described in the video below. Plus, there are a few more.
Did you know you can try these project organization techniques today? Download a copy of Standard Time® and try them for free. You might become inspired to learn more about your own projects and find that organizing them simplifies the monolithic list you have now.
Use your “stuff” the best way possible in manufacturing. Haha, that’s one way to put it! This is just a quickie video to help introduce and explain resource allocation. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, this little video might help. And, it’s always worth hearing another perspective if you’re an “old salt” in the project management industry.
Manufacturing resource planners, like Standard Time® make light work of this kind of project management. And, they’re not bad at collecting actuals from the factory floor. E.g. actuals like time, materials, inventory usage, machine hours, and tool usage. Consider taking a look.
The video below shows a quick overview of task link dependencies. In other words, one task is dependent upon another. When the first task is completed, the next one can start. What the video, then scroll down below it for more information.
There are four types of link relationships in this video:
As the names suggest, these link relationships are associated with task dates. Start and Finish dates affect other tasks. When a predecessor date changes, a successor task will be moved to reflect the link relationship.
Now you can get job status on your phone. Introducing the Work In Progress Android app, by Scoutwest, Inc.
Want to track progress of jobs and employees? Try the new Standard Time® Work In Progress Android app. The video below demonstrates.
You just set it up to pull data from the Standard Time Web Edition or Windows Edition. It syncs every 15 minutes. You have up-to-date info on the status of every job and employee working on them. Find out which jobs are taking too long. See when employee timers are not running, or running too long. And get a list of every time log in the system. Keep track of jobs right on your phone. Get notifications when project events occur.
Events the app shows notifications for:
This notification helps make sure everyone is working. If an hour passes, and employees are not tracking time, the app notifies you. (You set the threshold) You see the last time they worked, and the job they worked on. You can check in with them to determine status, and encourage them to restart the job.
This notification helps catch cases where employees forgot to stop a timer. You can go into the Standard Time desktop or web app and stop the timer, and reset the stop time. That helps ensure hours are correct.
When jobs get out of control, you sometimes want to be notified. You set the percentage to be notified at. The app watches for too many hours, and pops up a standard phone notification when the percentage exceeds your setting. Now you can jump on the problem and make sure things get finished up and moving forward.
This is another way to disconnect you from the desktop. Check project status anywhere, and be notified when something goes wrong.
Check out the video and give it a try!
Project managers have to juggle jobs – what a concept! Many of the jobs have to be linked together. One job can’t start until another is finished. Sorry, that’s just the nature of engineering.
Wanna watch a video? See below.
Finish-to-start is the most common link dependency. It means, when one task finishes another can start. Or, another way of saying it is, one task cannot start until the previous one is complete. This kind of link dependency models real life. A roof cannot be put on a house until the foundation is laid and the framing is complete. That’s only natural. This kind of link dependency occurs in engineering all the time.
Standard Time® is a time tracking app for engineering. Not only does it have tasks and links, but it also has a timesheet with lots of ways to enter time. One of those ways is with barcode and RFID’s. Time gets entered automatically using devices like that. That’s usually done on the shop floor, for manufacturing applications. But you can enter time manually against your own tasks. Managers define those tasks, and they magically show up on engineer’s timesheets for manual time entry. It’s a pretty good system.
Now back to dependency links. When you set up a “finish-to-start” link, you are using task dates. This kind of link means that the starting date of the second task is linked to the ending date of the first. If you move the first task, it’s ending date changes. And, that automatically moves the second task because it’s start date is dependent upon the first task. Again, this models reality in no may ways.
This is perfect for scheduling tasks. You simply set the dates for the first task, and successors follow along like cars on a train. They get pushed and pulled automatically anytime a predecessor date changes. Let’s say you are building an electronic circuit board. The circuit schematic precedes the board layout. And both those tasks precede fabrication and assembly. You could represent this natural link dependency with several tasks, each having finish-to-start links.
Now that you have some tasks, and the dates are linked, you could begin entering actual hours for employees. Or better yet, have them enter their own hours, and in some cases, create their own tasks. The whole plan takes on a life of it’s own. Now you’ve got a real engineering scheduler and timesheet!